Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Stories

This morning, the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala passed away, at the age of eighty-five. Beginning in 1957, Jhabvala published thirty-one stories in The New Yorker; her most recent story, “The Judge’s Will,” was published only a few weeks ago, in the March 25th issue. She was also a novelist (her eighth novel, “Heat and Dust,” won the Booker Prize in 1975) and a prolific screenwriter. In the course of her career, she wrote more than two dozen screenplays, most of them as an integral part of the Merchant and Ivory production team. She won two Oscars, for her adaptations of E. M. Forster’s “A Room with a View” and “Howards End.”

One of Jhabvala’s short-story collections, published in 1998, is called “East Into Upper East.” The title is a play on her own life story: starting in the seventies, she split her time between New York and New Delhi. But, in fact, that understates her geographical range. Ruth Prawer was born into a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, in 1927. Her father, Marcus, was a lawyer, and originally from Poland; her grandfather on her mother’s side was cantor of a large Cologne synagogue. In 1939, the family fled the Nazis and landed in London. It wasn’t until 1948 that her father learned the fate of his Polish relatives; when he discovered that they had all died in concentration camps, he committed suicide.

Ruth went on to live an international life. She earned a degree in English Literature at Queen Mary College, London University, and in 1951 she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an architect. Together, they moved to Delhi, where they raised three daughters, who are now married to an Indian, an American, and an Englishman. She had never felt quite settled in India, and eventually she moved to New York.

In a 1979 lecture, Jhabvala spoke about her rootlessness. She shared her admiration for writing that emerged from a sense of tradition and landscape, but she herself felt rootless: “I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture, till I feel—till I am—nothing.” And yet, she said, this was one of her strengths. Many of her stories are about a kind of inner travel: feeling rootless, her protagonists find new ways to feel at home in the worlds they happen to inhabit. In “The Teacher,” one of her recent stories for The New Yorker, a woman living alone in upstate New York becomes friends with a fraudulent guru; perhaps because his ideas are nonsense, she finds herself making sense of her own life. In “The Judge’s Will,” a woman meets her husband’s long-time mistress, and the encounter pushes her to see her husband and son in a new, and possibly more rewarding and realistic, way.

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As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.